Do you buy photopass photos?

I have about five or six 5x7 and 8x12 photos! I think they're really fun and always make me happy to look at. I don't buy the ones with the "characters" they superimpose into the shot, but I do sometimes like to add the "Magic Kingdom 2005"-type emebellishments.

They do a great job of selling them. They always get me to take a picture I don't plan on buying and then I wind up seeing it when I get home and thinking "why not?"

I have found that by far the best deal if you plan on buying some photopass pictures, is to prebuy the photo pass disc before you go. I am not sure of the exact price this year, but last year when we went it was $99.00 and it was good for ALL photopass pictures you had taken during your stay. Once you got home you could log on to their website viiew all the pictures and add borders and many other enhancements to each picture and you could even have three or four of the same shot with different borders and if you had, say a hundred shots originally, you could wind up with three or four hundred pictures on you disc and you get them all. The only problem with this offer is the you only get the disc in the mail and you have to have the pictures develioped at your local Walgreens pharmacy or Wal-mart or similar. Also Disneys gives you the release so you will not run into any copyright problems.

I think Shelley mentioned that as well talking about her family reuinion. It seems like a really nice thing to have except I'm not sure I see enough Photopass guys around to get enough pictures. If I had one follow me around it would definitely be worth it. Did you have any trouble getting enough shots, or are photopass guys everywhere if you're looking for them?

Am I bad if I just swipe them off the website when I get home?

What resolution do they show up on the web site?

Enough to make a decent 5 1/2.

Given their policy on having Photopass guys take pictures with your own camera, I can't imagine they mind too much.

Yes, they will add your photo session to your photopass. We did one in April 2008. After all the edits we ended up with around 600 pictures on our CD

I think the CD where you just get everything is great. Buying individual photos would not be my style though.

Great to know. Shelley -- can you manipulate those photos, or is it "take 'em as they come?"

you can edit them, crop them, change to black and white, and add borders. I would put each border on each picture so that way when I printed them out I had all the choices.

That's great. Another question -- With the CDs, are you able to send photos digitally and/or upload them to websites (eg facebook?)?

Yes, you can. You have a copyright waiver and basically you are the owner of the photos.

That's REALLY good to know. That isn't how regular photopass works, right? Just the resort photo shoots?

All the photopass CD's I have ever bought have the copyright waiver. That's the beauty of the CD. It might be somewhat expensive upfront (~$100) but if you have enough pictures once you edit them, then it's well worth it. I think individual pictures that you buy are like $13 so if you have 50+ pictures that you would purchase it is well worth it. You can print as many as pictures as you want once you have the CD. I normally just take the CD to Walmart and print out the pictures there. I have printed out to 8x10 size with no problems

CD seems to make a lot more sense to me too.

As shelley has said, ALL photos that were taken with the photopass card qualify for being bought on the CD, and will have the copyright waver. This includes ride pictures that can be attached to your photopass card, such as Test Track.

My suggestion here is that one should plan ahead of time that one will get the photopass, and then try to get as many photos as possible on that particular trip. Anything less than 100 would be a waste of money, I would say. So try to have some pictures taken each time you bump into one of the photopass cast members. Get at least 100 shots, which should be easy to do if you're there for a week.

And before you leave on your vacation, get the pre-arrival saving on the CD by visiting here:

http://www.disneyphotopass.com/previsitcdplan.aspx

by preordering the CD ahead of time.

And as a further suggestion, don't buy the CD at the park!. Go home, and then look over all your pictures online. Add borders, special effects, etc.. etc. and save to your online photo album. This means that not only do you now have the original pictures that were taken, you also have fun ones that you have edited ADDED to your photopass album. These are all included automatically when you order your photopass CD, something you won't get had you not edit your photos and bought the CD at the parks.

So, to summarize, here's the sequence of events:

1. Pre-order your photopass CD before you leave for your vacation
2. Get a gazillion photopass pictures while you're at the theme parks
3. Go online after you get home (you have 30 days to do this) and edit your photos
4. Buy photopass CD.

Capice?

Zz.

Capice!! Thanks for the run-down Shelley and Zapperz

Another thing that has sold me on photopass, is that everyone is in the picture. No more vacations where one person is missing from all the pictures because they were the photographer.

ZapperZ is right in saying that pre-planning is best as well as stopping at each and every photographer that you see. No matter if you have already had a picture taken there during that trip...take another....it's probably a different time of day, etc. The more pictures you can get on your CD the better. Right now I am working on my D23 photopass. I only had 17 original pictures and right now with the current edits I have 60 pictures. Hopefully by the time I order I will have around 100 or so.

Wow! Really good stuff on here. Things I didnt know. On our honeymoon trip, we had some photopass pictures taken...but not nearly enough to justify paying about $125 for the CD. Next time, we will know what to do and definitly make it part of our plans.

One question tho...do the photopass people take pictures at character meals? I'm still a little steamed about our Chef Mickey's breakfast...

I don't think so. Though I have seen photopass photographers at character meals, they're not at all of them, so you can't count on it.

Boy, I have found some of the most useful information searching old threads! We fell in love with the Photo Pass on our last trip. We hadn't thought much about it before the trip, but stopped and took PP photos here and there. Turns out they were some of the best pictures of the whole trip. Best part for us was if you get a PP during a special event (like MNSSHP), you save 40% (IIRC)! Even better, all your photos on your regular PP can be added to the special event one to get the same savings on all of them! I didn't know about the prepaid CD. We're definitely going to have to look into that for the next trip.

I get the prepaid CD and I find it to be a great deal, however many photos we get, and it is usually a lot because we are never rushed in the parks. Whenever we find a Photopass photog we stop and let him do his thing, and it usually amounts to 2, 3, or 4 photos per stopand then when we get home we log on to the photopass website and edit them all to add borders etc. so we end up with at least two or three times the original amount of photos taken. All for the prepaid price.

We mainly take pictures of other stuff, rather than ourselves, which is why we don't get the Photopass, but we still consider it sometimes.

When we stayed on property in 2007 we stopped at every photopass photographer we saw and bought the CD on our last day. There must have been about 100 pics on there. We're planning to stay on property again on our next trip, so will probably do the same again.

I've forgotten if you have a hotel in mind yet?

I'd love to stay at an Epcot area hotel but suspect budgets will put us in Pop Century. The way we tend to attack the parks with 16 hour days being normal, it's only really a place to sleep and shower so it probably won't make much difference in the end.
It won't be until late 2011 (much to far away) so there's plenty of time for changes of plan yet.